


Worthless

by sapphireswimming



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Character Death, Crime, Damian Cray is a terrible boss, Eagle Strike, Gen, Gen Work, Humor, Missing Scene, Murder, Oneshot, Unappreciated henchmen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22039513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphireswimming/pseuds/sapphireswimming
Summary: So exactly how does one go about cleaning up two million dollars worth of nickels?
Kudos: 7





	Worthless

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7705991/1/Worthless
> 
> Co-written with dannyboymw (@dannyboymw on fanfiction.net)
> 
> Our copy had nickels, although we're aware that other versions have different monetary denominations

The man was dead. Buried beneath the immense weight of millions of American nickels. There was no doubt whatsoever that the man was in fact dead. His screams had been drowned out within a few minutes of the barrage of money and there had been no movement beneath the shining metal disks for quite some time now. He had either been suffocated or crushed by the coins which piled around him like so much sand in an hourglass. But either way, he was dead.

Blood Money. That was what Damian Cray called it. The funds given to a traitor of his country.

Bloody money. That's what it was now.

Clean it up, Damian had told them. Get the money gone and his office cleaned. But just how exactly did one go about cleaning up forty million nickels and a dead body? Their employer had given them no instructions, leaving them to do the job as they saw fit.

Fitz-Gerald suggested piggy banks. Lots and lots of piggy banks. But Fitz-Gerald was a man who looked like one of those hairy caterpillars had crawled beneath his nose and died there and so Bismarck, who was the senior security officer anyway, knew to ignore anything he suggested.

Instead, Bismarck ordered for a change counter to be sent up along with a load of those silver briefcases that Cray seemed to have lying about everywhere.

Once they had their equipment, the two guards looked at the sealed room, currently looking like something out of a film and, with a deep breath, pressed the correct buttons on the touchpad to open the sealed vault.

It was a veritable cascade of silver, rushing and raging out of the doorway as soon as the smallest crack had opened. Soon, it was pouring out like nothing they had seen, spraying out at them like bullets. Fitz-Gerald lost his balance with a scream, opening himself up further to the torrent of metal. Bismarck had to move around the desk in order to escape the same fate. 

Eventually, however, the nickels trickled to a halt, revealing the smushed form of ex-American agent Charlie Roper. He looked terrible. Bloody and bruised even after death, his face was splotchy and red and his eyes were still open, staring in astonishment at the sea of money surrounding him.

That was the first item of business to take care of. Bismarck grudgingly helped Fitz-Gerald up and then motioned for him to grab the dead man's arms to carry him out of the way. Fitz-Gerald balked, not feeling fortified enough to be on the end with the man's face and staring eyes, even after Bismarck had sighed, stomped over, and closed them. After some pleading, the two men switched places and soon Roper was lying prone against the wall in a part of the room well away from the cash flow. He wouldn't even have a chance to get a hold of it in death.

Thankfully for the two guards, even though he had been pretty smashed up, there was very little blood on his body, so they didn't have to worry about staining the carpets.

That unpleasant task accomplished, the two turned back to face the money. There was just so much of it! Two million dollars worth, forty million coins. It had completely filled the sealed chamber and now spilled out well beyond the desk. The vast quantity almost stymied them, but then again, it really didn't matter where they began.

Bismarck grabbed the first handful of coins and dumped it into the funnel of the coin counter. It was a good thing that it was industrial size, nearly filling up half of Cray's desktop, or their task would have taken them hours to complete. But someone had had to count out every single nickel before the pop singer had pulled this little stunt, and since money was no object to him, he had gone out and gotten the best model on the market, the one that high end bankers used to count and wrap the money they received each day.

Handful after handful they poured in, pound after pound, dollar after dollar of nickels. The machine rapidly calculated. Five dollars. Then fifty. Two hundred. After a few minutes, a thousand.

As soon as the machine counted the coins, it rolled them up into neat paper tubes and spit them out of a side ramp so that they knocked against each other in a tray at the bottom every time another one came out. Fitz-Gerald took upon himself the task of packing these tubes into the numerous briefcases until they were full, each one as heavy as he could lift and containing more than a thousand dollars worth of nickels. Bismarck continued shoveling the coins into the machine, as fast as he could move and it could handle.

They worked in silence. Fitz-Gerald didn't have much to say and Bismarck wouldn't have listened anyway.

They had a job to be doing. And they were doing it for Cray. He was temperamental on the best of days, but for the past week, he had been positively keyed up. They wanted to finish this task as quickly as possible so they could both go back to their normal rounds patrolling the hallways or front gate. It wasn't fun to be too close to the billionaire. Not nearly as fun as they had thought it would be as they signed on for a job to work security for the most celebrated and popular philanthropist and singer in the nation. It was interesting at times. With the Gameslayer coming out, it definitely had its moments to be connected to the great man and his plant, but only when they got home and could brag about it… not when they were here… face to face with what the man actually did. He killed men with nickels.

It took them all of the briefcases that had been sent up, three changes in roll paper in the machine, and more than two hours, but thankfully not the five that Bismarck expected, for them to finally come to the end.

Now, he was picking up the nickels one by one from the carpet and the various nooks and crannies around the room because there weren't enough of them together to sweep up in his hands. He was nearly at forty million, just had a few hundred left to go. He scoured the room for them, beneath the desk, under the corner of the Oriental rug, behind the furniture nearest the ventilated side room.

Fitz-Gerald stacked the briefcases on top of each other, his arms now straining with the weight as he hoisted them into the air. With a laugh, he turned back to his companion.

"What do you say we each take a briefcase home?"

Bismarck looked up from his odd position on the floor to stare at the fair hared man.

"Hmm? What? What did you say?" he asked. He hadn't been paying any attention to his companion.

"I said, 'what do you say we each take a briefcase home'. There's more than a thousand dollars in each and Cray could easily spare the money."

Bismarck stared at him like he was crazy. It was ideas like this, in addition to the worst excuse for a mustache he had ever seen, that made him tune the man out nearly every time he spoke.

"You're crazy, Fitz-Gerald. Cray may be able to spare the money, but he would definitely miss it. We're getting paid enough. A thousand dollars isn't enough to go risking this job for. You see what he does to people he doesn't like. He doesn't bother firing them, he fires at them." He jerked his thumb over at Charlie Roper as if to further demonstrate his point. Fitz-Gerald looked at the cold corpse and paled.

He would have said that Bismarck was right and he should forget the entire thing when Damian Cray walked back into his office. He was taking a short respite from his master-minding to see how his office was shaping up.

He stepped over the body of the American NSA official and a quick look of disgust crossed his face. "Oh my, he doesn't look too good, does he?" He asked no one in particular.

"No, sir, he doesn't." Fitz-Gerald answered.

It was then that Damian Cray turned to look at his security man. Fitz-Gerald was taller than he was and infinitely worse-looking, but at least he was being useful now. He stood in front of a stack of silver briefcases that stood taller than Cray.

"I suppose that those hold my money?" he asked, caressing the corner of the one nearest him.

"Yes, sir. The machine's counting up the last of it now."

Cray turned over to Bismarck and the machine.

"That's all of it?"

Bismarck was hesitant to answer. It was everything that he could find. The machine just popped out the last roll of nickels now. But he had seen the results of displeasing Cray and he very much wanted to avoid that by not saying the wrong thing now.

"Yes, sir."

Cray pursed his lips and made a nod of approval as he looked around the room.

"This place cleaned up quite nicely."

"Thank you, sir."

"Yes… there's just one thing…"

Both men froze and neither one had the guts to ask Cray what he meant. He was still speaking with his acting voice, but it had taken on a definite edge. Neither of them wanted to be cut by it.

"You see, I left this room knowing that there were two million dollars here. But now, I see that the machine has not reached that same mark." He looked back and forth between the guards. "There are still several hundred nickels missing. They haven't made it through the machine. I don't see them on the ground. I don't think he's taken them…" he pointed back to the dead man. "And no one else has been in here. Which means that the only possibility left is that you have taken the missing money."

Bismarck looked over at Fitz-Gerald in alarm. He had just been joking about taking some of the money, had he actually pocketed some of the money? He would get them both killed if he decided to play Damian Cray like that. But no, the missing nickels hadn't made it through the machine… or the machine hadn't counted them right.

"Perhaps the machine miscounted… sir…"

Damian looked at him as if he had lost his head. He had at least lost his mind, it seemed like. What kind of people was he employing?

"This is the latest model on the market. I was assured and shown that it would not miscount a single penny in five million dollars. You are suggesting that it somehow missed hundreds of nickels in only two?"

He was staring up into his guard's face. Somehow, even though Bismarck towered over the man in height and bulk, he was the one cowering.

"No… no, sir, that was not what I meant, I just…"

"You just what? You thought you could steal from me? You thought I wasn't paying you enough and you had to take it out of this pile right now? You thought I wouldn't know about it, didn't you?" Bismarck said nothing. "Didn't you?" Cray spit into his face.

When the man didn't speak, he continued. "Ah, I've guiltied your conscious into silence, have I?"

"Sir, really, I haven't touched your money."

"It seems to me that you've had your filthy paws all over it for several hours now."

"I've touched it, but I haven't taken any of it. I promise!"

Cray didn't believe him and walked over to the desk, picking up the guard's discarded gun. Fitz-Gerald's eyes went wide. Bismarck's went wider.

"Sir, if I really did take it, a few hundred nickels is just a few dollars, that's pocket money, that's change, that's nothing." Cray didn't care and advanced on him, cocking the gun.

The tall man furiously turned his pockets out to reveal nothing but lint. "Sir! Sir, I don't have any of your money. Search me and if you find anything, you can take it back and I'll give you more. I don't want your money and I haven't taken any of it!" He was breathing hard, but trying to hold himself together. Security guards didn't break down the moment they saw a gun, but it was rather a different story when you were staring down the barrel.

"Frankly, I don't care about the money either. I'm rich. I can afford to lose a few nickels." Bismarck sighed quietly. "But what I do care about is my employees doing what I tell them to do and not trying to take advantage of me. You unfortunately, have not done that."

"But, sir-"

"You're fired."

And the gun went off.

Bismarck stood still for a moment, then crumpled to the ground, a red stain seeping through the front of his shirt.

Fitz-Gerald stared in disbelief.

Cray let out a satisfied laugh as he looked at the gun in his hand. "Ha! That worked. That was fun." He looked down at the body at his feet. "Oh, but that's no good, he'll get blood all over the carpet." He turned. "You! You there, mustache man, take care of this fellow before he gets blood all over my carpet, will you?"

Fitz-Gerald stood rooted in place, too terrified of the man in front of him to move. He tried, he honestly did, but as he caught sight of his companion… friend?... the blood drained from his face and the contents of his stomach threatened to come up. His employer saw and cried out, "Oh no, don't do that." He slapped his forehead. "Where do I get these security guards?"

"I don't know…" the remaining guard managed to squeak out before turning a definite shade of green.

"Oh, honestly…" Damian Cray muttered. And then he fired again.

He looked around at his handiwork. One traitor crushed to death with money, another thief shot for taking money and some other guard who wasn't able to do his job had been stopped just in time to save his lush flooring.

Then, a light seemed to have been switched on in his head. He needed to be going. He had a plane to catch and a boy's life to ruin. But this needed to be taken care of. It really wouldn't do to have three corpses sitting in his study for much longer. Already, the American was starting to smell. Cray wrinkled his nose and called for two more guards, who quickly came into the room and assessed the situation.

They moved the first victim first as he was the furthest along the road of decomposition. Each guard held his breath as he went to heft the man. When they did, something odd happened. Things began to move, clinking and making his clothing fall oddly from his dead body. When they moved him a bit more, they found the cause of it.

Nickels poured from his shirt and his pockets until there was a pool of several hundred coins beneath him. The several hundred missing nickels for which he had just shot the other guard.

Cray looked fixedly at the money for a long moment, then lightly shrugged his shoulders and walked out the door without so much as another glance behind him.

He had better things to be doing than to cry over spilt nickels.


End file.
